Women and Church Leadership LESSON 2 of 13...• The mantle of divine authority was worn by the prophet more so than by the priest. It was often the duty of prophets to correct the

Transcript - ML508 Women and Church Leadership© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 2 of 13ML508

Women and Religious Leadership in the Old Testament

Women and Church Leadership

Introduction

Last week we began this course with a case study on slavery as a way of bringing to the forefront some issues of hermeneutics that dog any discussion of women and church leadership. Our purpose in spending time looking at the way the Bible was used to defend slavery by slaveholders 150 years ago is to help us discern how the Bible may be used incorrectly today to defend unbiblical ideas and attitudes on other subjects (including wom-en and church leadership). I deliberately chose to work with an issue that is not an issue today—at least not in many parts of the world. We did this to help get a more objective handle on how we may or may not use the Scriptures in defense of or opposition to an idea or practice.

Religious leadership in the Old Testament

We begin our exploration of the Bible’s examples of people in religious leadership in the Old Testament, starting from the cultural fact that family life throughout the Ancient Near East (ANE) was primarily “patriarchal.”

What is meant by patriarchy? The Oxford dictionaries define patriarchy as “a system or government in which the father or el-dest male is head of the family and descent is reckoned through the male line; also, a system of government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.” While patri-archy is primarily concerned with the relationship of fathers to sons and to issues of inheritance, the term today now includes the second half of the Oxford dictionary definition—that men hold power and women are largely excluded from it.

We find the beginnings of patriarchy in Genesis 3, the account of the fall of Adam and Eve into disobedience and sin and their expulsion from the garden of Eden. Because of their sin, God de-

Dr. Alice MatthewsAcademic Dean- Christian

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Transcript - ML508 Women and Church Leadership © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


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creed that each one would become subject to his or her source. The man would become subject to the ground from which he was taken. “Cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground; for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:17-19). The woman would become subject to her source, Adam: “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children; your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (3:16). The pattern of working together as equals established by God in Gen-esis 2:18 was overturned by sin.

Within only a few generations of Adam and Eve, we meet La-mech in Genesis 4:19-24, a domineering macho-man who boasts to his two wives (Adah and Zillah) that his rule of thumb is not merely tit-for-tat, but “I have killed a man for wounding me, even a young man for hurting me.” The punishment he meted out was greater than the crime against him. We read in Genesis 6:5 that several generations after Lamech, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Francis Schaeffer noted that “sin requires hierarchy,” some rule of law that curbs the evil lurking in the sinful human heart. So as we read through the early books of the Old Testament, we see the necessity for a rule of law, which ultimately is God’s Law given on Mount Sinai (Exodus 19ff.). A major portion of the Law had to do with Israel’s worship for which a cadre of priests would be necessary (Exodus 28:1ff.).

Priests and prophets

But when we look at the religious practice of ministry in the Old Testament, we see two traditions:

• We see the priesthood with its cult, its sacrifices, its tabernacle or temple.

• We see the prophetic ministry of the Word of God.

In your Online Blog/Journal, divide a blank screen in half verti-cally (from top to bottom). At the top of the left column write PRIESTS, and at the top of the right column write PROPHETS. Now brainstorm for yourself all of the biblical qualifications for



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each: What was required for a person to serve as a priest? or as a prophet? Write your observations in the appropriate columns. Take no more than 10 minutes for this exercise.

A. The priesthood

Now look at your list of qualifications for Old Testament priests. Your list should include the facts that an Old Testament priest must be male, must be from the tribe of Levi (a descendant of Aaron), and must be without blemish of any kind.

Obviously, no woman could be a priest. Nor could any man who could not trace his ancestry back to Levi, Jacob’s third son by Leah. The office of priest came to a man as a birthright. The priesthood was based on genealogy, not on the call of God. Becoming a priest had nothing to do with the possession of special spiritual gifts, merit, or competence. Priests were holy in terms of ritual observance, not in terms of personal goodness and sanctity. If you read Exodus 29 and Leviticus 8, you see that God took Aaron’s consecration to his role as high priest very seriously in dress and in ritual. But the priesthood later degener-ated into faithlessness. The stories of faithless priests show up throughout the Old Testament.

Priests had two tasks: (1) They were to represent the people to God through the system of sacrifices, and (2) they were to instruct the people in the statutes of the Lord. Under the first, they were in charge of worship (Leviticus 1:7–7:34). They were to watch over the fire on the altar of burnt offering (keeping it burning day and night, never extinguished). And they were to of-fer the morning and evening sacrifices at the door of the taber-nacle (later at the temple). During the 40 years in the wilderness, they were also responsible for the proper transportation of the ark of the covenant and the other parts of the tabernacle. And, throughout their history, they were to teach the people the law of God (Leviticus 10:11; Deuteronomy 33:10; 2 Chronicles 15:3; Ezekiel 44:16-24).

As we watch the priests in action in the later Old Testament and in the Gospels, we see that the priesthood was elite, exclusive, and professional. It became an institution of power, both politi-cal and economic.

B. The prophetic gift or role

Now look at what you listed as the qualifications for being a prophet and think about this question: How did a person become



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a prophet? People became prophets, not from ancestry, but from the call and empowering of God. The task of the prophet was

primarily to focus people’s attention on hearing, understanding, and obeying the Word of the Lord.

The ordinary Hebrew word for prophet was nabi, which came from the verb meaning to “bubble forth” like a fountain. A prophet was someone who announced or poured forth the decla-rations of God.

Our English word prophet comes from the Greek word proph-etes, meaning “one who speaks for another,” especially someone who speaks for God, someone who interprets God’s will to us.

So the essential meaning of a prophet is that of an interpreter. We see this in 1 Corinthians 14:3: The one who prophesies speaks edification and exhortation and comfort to God’s people.

Priests and prophets differed from each other in a number of ways:

• Priests spoke to God on behalf of the people, and prophets spoke to the people on behalf of God.

• Priests carried on the ministry of sacrifice in the tabernacle or temple, but prophets spoke God’s Word wherever they could get a hearing.

• The priestly worship was confined to ritual: God was an object to be moved by a sacrifice. Prophets, on the other hand, focused worship on hearing and doing the will of God.

• For the prophets, God was a subject to be heard, not an object to be moved.

• The priesthood itself was a power structure, whereas prophets generally challenged existing power structures.

• The mantle of divine authority was worn by the prophet more so than by the priest. It was often the duty of prophets to correct the priests and to stand in judgment on them at times of spiritual defection (cf. Isaiah 1:11-17; Amos 5:21-24, etc.).



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Prophets had authority to appoint kings, to denounce their wrongdoings, and to pronounce their demise (e.g., Saul). Proph-ets in the Old Testament were raised up by God to tell Israel what God wanted the nation to know—about God, about sin, and the danger they courted.

According to Smith’s Bible Dictionary, prophets had one or more of these eight functions:

1. They were the national poets. (It’s striking how much OT prophecy is poetic!)

2. They were the historians (cf. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Haggai, for history).

3. They were patriots, basing their patriotism on religious motives.

4. They preached a spiritual religion of the heart (not higher or purer than the law, but more plainly declared with greater forcefulness).

5. They were extraordinary but were also autho-rized exponents of the Law.

6. They held a pastoral or quasi-pastoral office.

7. They were a political power.

8. Their most essential characteristic was that they revealed God’s will to the people through predicting the future and through interpreting the Scriptures.

II. At no time in the Old Testament do we find any woman func-tioning as part of the priestly power structure. We do, however, find women exercising the prophetic ministry of the Word.

Who were some of these women?

A. Miriam, sister of Moses and Aaron

For those who grew up attending Sunday school, Miriam’s name is familiar. She is the older sister of Moses and Aaron, the one whose mother set her to watch as the infant Moses floated in a tiny waterproofed basket near the bank of the Nile River where the Egyptian princess came down to bathe. You may remember how astutely Miriam led the princess to desire a Hebrew nurse



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for the baby and how Moses’ mother actually was able to care for him on behalf of the princess, in spite of the law about killing all Hebrew boy babies. This familiar story about Moses hidden in the bulrushes is one most of us learned when we were very young. His big sister Miriam was courageous and resourceful. She saved his life. It took a lot of courage for a Hebrew slave girl to walk up to the daughter of the king, a hostile ruler, and offer to find a Hebrew nurse for the baby. That took guts.

Now, 80 years later, we again meet Miriam in Exodus 15:20-21. “Now Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took the tim-brel in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tim-brels and with dances. And Miriam answered them: ‘Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously! The horse and its rider he has thrown into the sea!’ “ God had just used Moses as his spokesperson to lead the people of God out of slavery in Egypt, crossing the Red Sea on dry ground, then watching the armies of Pharaoh drown as the waters rushed back over them. In awe, the people stood on the east side of the Red Sea, free after four centuries of slavery. They were safe! As Moses and all the people sang a song of praise to God for delivering them dramatically from the power of the Egyptians, Miriam led the women in sing-ing and dancing. It was a great scene! It may have been a high point in Miriam’s life.

We don’t know much about Miriam except that the Bible tells us that she was a prophetess. We do know that God gave her a lead-ership role in the nation of Israel. The prophet Micah tells us in 6:4 that God said, “I brought you up out of Egypt and redeemed you from the land of slavery. I sent Moses to lead you, also Aaron and Miriam.” Miriam worked with her two brothers to lead the people of God. We don’t know the specifics of her leadership role, only that she was more than just the sister of two famous brothers. God said that she was part of the leadership team.

In Numbers 12, we see that Miriam (and her brother Aaron) blew it, letting selfish desire get the better of them. Miriam may have been the instigator of the criticism of Moses with Aaron tagging along. We don’t know how complicit he was in saying that Mo-ses had no monopoly on divine communication. But the Bible is clear that Miriam was a prophet and Aaron was high priest, and both were leaders of Israel with Moses. But they were not in the same league with their brother. Numbers 12:6-8 tells us that “When a prophet of the Lord is among you, I reveal myself to him in visions, I speak to him in dreams. But this is not true of my servant Moses; . . . With him I speak face to face, clearly and



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not in riddles; he sees the form of the Lord.”

For criticizing Moses, Miriam was covered with leprosy, the most loathsome disease known in the ancient world. Contagious and quarantined from Israel, she was shunned by the people she had earlier impressed. In her punishment, we see her stature: Those to whom much has been given, much is required. She was a strong person and she received a strong punishment, banished from the camp for 7 days—a time to think things out and correct her attitude before she was healed.

B. Deborah

Deborah is another familiar biblical character from Sunday school days. You may want to pause this lecture now and read through Judges 4 and 5. From the opening verses, we learn three things about her (Judges 4:4-5):

• First, she was a prophet, a person who spoke the words of God. God called her and gifted her to speak to men and women to strengthen, comfort, and encourage them. God also gave her knowledge of the future and insight into how to bring that home to the Israelites.

• Second, she was the wife of Lappidoth, about whom we know nothing apart from the fact that he was married to Deborah. But this tells us that she was not a single woman who could give her whole life to ministry for God. She also had the responsibilities of home and husband. But note the order of the sacred text: She was first a prophet, then a wife. She had a balancing act to play every day.

• Third, Deborah was Israel’s leader, called a judge at that time. Exodus 18:25-26 tells us that in early patriarchal times, “capable men from all the people” were to serve as judges. As people settled down in Canaan, most judges were mainly military leaders who came to power in times of national crisis. In one sense they were more generals than judges. But judges rose to power also because they had wisdom and were able to administer justice in the family, tribe, or nation. Deborah was both military leader and one who administered justice from her seat under the Palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel.



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In the centuries-long period between Joshua’s death and Saul’s crowning as Israel’s first king, the Israelites lived as a loose con-federacy of tribes worshiping at the tabernacle in Shiloh. During those centuries, a pattern repeated itself several times: with no stable central government, the 12 tribes of Israel each did their own thing. Judges 21:25 tells us that “In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.”

It was a time of anarchy and apostasy. The Israelites repeatedly copied pagan practices from their neighbors—human sacrifice, ritual prostitution, etc, adding these to the worship of Yahweh. As a result, one tribe, then another fell to foreign powers and was enslaved or forced to pay exorbitant tributes. After years of servitude, someone in the tribe would call out to God, beg-ging for deliverance. A judge would rise up to organize a military campaign to throw off the oppressors. Then the tribe would live in peace until the people again wandered from God.

Some judges were better than others. If you read through the book of Judges, you meet Samson, Gideon, Deborah, and others. Some were better generals than leaders. But when we turn to Judges 4, we find that Deborah combined the best qualities of an Old Testament judge: She was splendid in military strategy, and she was superb as judge adjudicating problems people brought to her. She was trusted. The text tells us that Israelites came to her from all over the land to have her decide their disputes. Thus we meet good wife Deborah, a prophet and a judge.

From the opening verses of Judges (4:1-3) we learn that Jabin, king of Canaan with headquarters in Hazor, cruelly oppressed the northern Israelite tribes for 20 years. The situation was bad: People couldn’t use the roads but had to sneak from village to village by hidden paths and clandestine trails. Village life ceased. Farmers had to thresh grain in secret at night in caves. Life and property were worth nothing. People were hunted down like rabbits. Women were raped. It was a brutal oppression that had gone on for 20 years.

Note that Jabin did not oppress all the land of Israel, only the tribes in the north. Deborah lived and worked in the south, in Ephraim. But she didn’t ignore the plight of her people in the north when, as she heard stories of cruelty, in Judges 4:6-7 we see her move into action, calling a northerner—Barak of Naph-tali—then commissioning him to raise up an army of 10,000 soldiers to defeat Jabin’s occupation forces.



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We hear the prophet at work as she talked to Barak: “The Lord, the God of Israel, commands you.” Barak responds in verse 8, “If you [Deborah] go with me, I’ll go; but if you don’t go with me, I won’t go.” Barak didn’t dispute God’s game plan, but he wanted to be sure he had God’s mouthpiece at his side in battle. Barak’s confidence in Deborah tells us a lot about her leadership. It also tells us about a man who wasn’t afraid to follow a woman leader when he believed that she spoke the very words of God.

What followed in Judges 4 is a familiar story of God’s deliver-ance. With many reasons for fear, Barak and his ill-armed army assembled on the flanks of Mount Tabor in full view of Jabin’s army with its 900 iron chariots and vast military might down on the plain. Then Deborah shouted to Barak, “Go! This is the day the Lord has given Sisera [the general] into your hands. Has not the Lord gone ahead of you?” Then Barak by faith went—perhaps trembling and weak in the knees, but he went—and God did the rest.

This was the prophet at work. God gave the motivation to Barak through Deborah, and God gave supernatural help through na-ture. Judges 5 gives some battle details in the victory song Debo-rah and Barak sang to celebrate God’s victory. Judges 5:31 tells us that “the land had peace” for 40 years. God’s gift to Israel in an hour of terrible need was wrapped in the mind and heart of a woman. Deborah shatters our stereotypes of what a leader must be. She had the spiritual gift of prophecy and the natural (per-haps also spiritual) gift of wisdom to judge God’s people well. She was God’s spokeswoman to whom generals and common-ers alike listened, a strong leader whose word commanded the strongest in the land.

Deborah was a judge, a military and political leader of the Is-raelites. But she used her prophetic gift as a spiritual leader as well, guiding the people in their decisions to honor the Lord God whose word she spoke.

C. Huldah

In 2 Kings 22, we meet a third woman who was also a prophet. She lived in Jerusalem at a solemn time in Israel’s history. David and Solomon had passed on, the nation had split into two rival groups (10 tribes in the North calling themselves Israel, and 2 tribes in the south calling themselves Judah). Idolatry, Baal wor-ship, ritual prostitution, and human sacrifice had again invaded the religious worship of the people. The Lord God was merely one god among many or wasn’t worshiped at all. The leaders of



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the northern nation were so evil and corrupt that in 722 BC all of the leadership of the nation was taken into captivity by Assyria and carted off east of the Euphrates River into exile.

In the south, the little nation of Judah fended off invaders, but it was only a matter of time before it too was taken captive. Ju-dah’s kings were evil men and the nation was corrupt. But in the midst of this, a prince named Josiah was born. His grandfather, Manasseh, was one of the most evil kings, and his father, Amon, wasn’t much better and was murdered by palace officials when Josiah was 8 years old. The young boy suddenly found himself on Judah’s throne, but with one difference: Somewhere (perhaps from his mother, Jedidah, or from his tutors) Josiah had learned to walk in the law of the Lord God, following David’s example. In the midst of a totally pagan generation with corrupt rulers came a young boy whose heart was turned toward the Lord God.

When Josiah was 26, he ordered God’s temple in Jerusalem to be renovated. It had lain in shambles, desecrated with pagan wor-ship, and it would take a lot of work to restore it. In the middle of the restoration process, a workman stumbled on an ancient scroll, which no one could understand or interpret.

Even Hilkiah, the high priest, could not understand this sacred writing. He reported the find to the king.

When King Josiah heard part of the scroll read to him, he tore his robes and ordered everyone to find out about this book. No doubt, if what the scroll said was true, his kingdom was in great danger. In 2 Kings 22:13, his order was: “Go, inquire of the Lord for me, for the people and for all Judah, concerning the words of this book that has been found; for great is the wrath of the Lord that is aroused against us, because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book, to do according to all that is written concerning us.” Josiah was clearly frightened, but he was a man of action: He wanted an interpreter for this book, a prophet who could discern its meaning.

Now a number of prophets lived in Jerusalem at that time. From Jeremiah 1:2, we know that Jeremiah had been in Jerusalem, receiving prophetic messages from God for Judah for at least 5 years at the time the scroll was found. In Zephaniah 1:1, we learn that Zephaniah was also prophesying in or near Jerusalem in the reign of Josiah. So does it strike you as strange that in 2 Kings 22:14, Hilkiah, the high priest, turned to a woman for an explanation of the word of the Lord? They brought in Huldah who lived in Jerusalem. She was the wife of Shallum, keeper of



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the royal wardrobe.

Sometimes we’re told that God has to use women to do men’s work because no men are available. It’s hard to support that from 2 Kings 22. God had given a special spiritual gift to the woman Huldah, and then used her to speak his message to the high priest and to the king.

We know very little about Huldah. Verse 14 tells us that she lived in the second district, which in the King James translation is called “the college.” On some old maps of Jerusalem, the second district is called the university district. Jewish tradition tells us that Huldah was probably a teacher. What we do know about her is that she was a prophet. She received God’s Word and deliv-ered it to men and women. The fact that the high priest and the king’s advisors sought her out tells us that she was known for her spiritual discernment and piety. She could be trusted to tell them the true words of God sharply, clearly, and accurately. And what were those words God gave her for the high priest and a king? 2 Kings 22:15-20 quotes her:

This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Tell the man who sent you to me, “This is what the Lord says: I am going to bring disaster on this place and its people, according to everything written in the book the king of Judah has read. Because they have forsaken Me and burned incense to other gods and pro-voked me to anger by all the idols their hands have made, my anger will burn against this place and will not be quenched.”

Tell the king of Judah who sent you to inquire of the Lord, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says concerning the words you heard: Because your heart was responsive and you humbled yourself before the Lord when you heard what I have spoken against this place and its people, that they would become ac-cursed and laid waste, and because you tore your robes and wept in my presence, I have heard you, declares the Lord. Therefore I will gather you to your fathers and you will be buried in peace. Your eyes will not see all the disaster I am going to bring on this place.” So they took her answer back to the king.

Huldah spoke strong words, not holding back. She spoke de-cisively, not beating around the bush. She didn’t apologize for God’s Word or refuse to answer because she was a woman and didn’t want to offend the men. She simply used her gift of prophecy. We don’t hear of her again. She was on and off stage in one quick dramatic scene.



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The king and high priest knew that she was God’s spokesperson. They didn’t go after a second opinion. As a result, the king insti-tuted a religious reform in Judah that was the most sweeping in centuries.

Conclusion

While the Bible called Miriam a prophet, we don’t know much about her in that role; we know a bit more about Deborah. But when we come to Huldah, we see a woman clearly interpreting God’s Word to a king, to the high priest, and to other courtiers. We learn in Isaiah 8:3 that the wife of the prophet Isaiah was also a prophet. Women exercised prophetic ministries in the Old Testament. We don’t know whether Miriam ever married. We do know that both Deborah and Huldah were married. We also know that Isaiah’s wife was a mother who was recognized as a prophet. Thus singleness, marriage, and motherhood did not interfere with whatever ministries God gave them as prophets.

Were there many women prophets in the Old Testament? Prob-ably not, but we don’t know that. Just as there were hundreds of prophets in the schools of the prophets but only a relatively few were named in biblical narratives, there may have been many more women prophets. But it’s likely their number was small.

I mentioned the schools of the prophets. While God’s law made provision for prophets, as long as priests honored their calling to teach God’s law to the people, prophets weren’t needed. But as the priests degenerated, prophets were called forward to speak God’s Word to the people. Samuel, a Levite of Kohath’s family (1 Chronicles 6:22-28), was almost certainly a priest; and we know from 1 Samuel 19:20 and 2 Kings 2:2-5, 4:38, and 6:1 that he organized companies or colleges of prophets. Apparently, prom-ising students were gathered and trained for prophetic office. Their chief subject of study was the law and its interpretation, tacitly transferring the teaching office from corrupt priests to prophets.

But belonging to the prophetic order and possessing the pro-phetic gift were not necessarily the same. The 16 Old Testament prophets with books in the Bible named for them probably be-longed to the prophetic order, but they were also endowed with the prophetic gift. But Amos (7:14) tells us that he was not of the order, but he did have the gift.

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Women and Religious Leadership in the Old TestamentLesson 2 of 13

Did these women prophets belong to the schools of the proph-ets? Probably not, though we can’t be sure they didn’t. My guess is that they, like Amos, had a gift from God without affiliation in one of the schools of the prophets.

When we turn to the New Testament, we ask if any women ministered as prophets. There we find in Acts 21:9 that the four daughters of Philip were all recognized as prophets. In 1 Corin-thians 11, Paul laid down rules for women exercising a prophetic ministry in public worship. And in 1 Corinthian 14:3, Paul de-fined the New Testament prophetic ministry as speaking to men and women for their “edification, exhortation, and comfort.”

In your Online Blog/Journal, write down your (tentative) answers to these two questions:

First, do you think that ministry as we know it today is primar-ily priestly or primarily prophetic? Is the work of church leaders primarily to represent the people to God or to teach God’s Word to the people?

Second question: However you answered the first question, does your answer add any useful information to the question of women and church leadership?

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Women and Church Leadership LESSON 2 of 13...• The mantle of divine authority was worn by the prophet more so than by the priest. It was often the duty of prophets to correct the